Sunday Salon Series with Clayton Patterson

Sunday, October 2, 2011, 2–5 pm

Clayton Patterson has created a series of five Sunday Salons for the BMW Guggenheim Lab. This week, join Patterson, documentarian, artist, and archivist of the Lower East Side since 1978, and moviemakers Jenner Furst, Ben Solomon, and Daniel Levin for an intimate talk. Furst produced and Solomon and Levin directed the documentary Captured: A Film History of the Lower East Side (2008), an historical account of drag, punk, heroin, and gentrification in the Lower East Side.

Ben Solomon was born and raised in downtown Manhattan. A child of the 1980s, son of a poet father and photographer mother, he grew up surrounded and inspired by the arts and the streets of New York. Captured (2008) was Ben’s first feature film, and since then has continued to express himself in a multitude of mediums, working as a filmmaker, a DJ, and always resourceful member of the local and international creative community.

Daniel Levin lives and works in New York. Captured (2008) was his first feature documentary. He is the director of photography for the second season of the Emmy Award–nominated Sundance Channel docu-series Brick City. He has shot films for HBO (Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags, 2009) and Sony Music (This Is Jim Jones, 2009). He shot and co-directed his first feature narrative, Dirty Old Town, which is being released this fall.

Jenner Furst began making narrative films in his early teens. Captured (2008) was his first feature documentary. Soon after the film’s release, Furst began collaborating on Brick City (2009), his early work on the series helping to elevate the vanguard concept, and the series went on to garner a Peabody Award, an Emmy nomination, and critical praise around the world. While co-producing the second season of Brick City, he directed his first feature narrative, Dirty Old Town.

Clayton Patterson’s hand on the history of the Lower East Side over the past 30-plus years is undeniable. As an artist, filmmaker and photographer, Patterson’s unending political, cultural, and at times illegal documentation of Lower East Side life has captured everything from drag queens and tattoo artists to police brutality. As a gallery owner, Patterson has shown work ranging from Dash Snow to Charles Gatewood. With Captured, his documentation of the last free period of the Lower East Side became a documentary. In the 1980s he became a happenstance cap-maker, and his embroidered jackets and caps soon found their way to Hollywood (Mick Jagger and Matt Dillon were fans).